[Beyond PlayStation] Sadame

Sadame presents a story about quashing the uprising undead horde, which is set in Nobunaga’s era in Feudal Japan. The undead are threatening all of Japan, so you have to defeat their leader Oda Nobunaga to set Japan free. Want to learn more?

Sadame is a hack and slash release set 100 years after the Onion war during feudal Japan. Players must kill all enemies on a single stage before progressing to the next, eradicating evil from the land. Sadame has a progression system you can use to level up and unlock new cool skills for whichever of the four classes you choose to control. Your options for warriors are the Samurai, who uses swords and has a special ability that reduces incoming damage. The Ninja uses sickle chains, shuriken, and traps, with a special ability that enables the Ninja to use spells at a low cost. The Monk is a magic user with staffs as a main weapon, and the special ability is Aura that enables him to imbue weapons with elemental damage. The Rogue is an archer that uses bows and polearms, and her special ability is sustain which enables support spells to be used infinitely.

The gameplay and combat system is not difficult to understand since it’s of the hack and slash variety. By using the face buttons, you can activate basic attacks, dual attacks and the skills you’ll gain access to as you level up. Every single enemy you overcome will reward you with experience points, and the better you do, the more options you’ll have to customize your skill tree – which is pretty big, actually.

As you progress through the game, the levels get more and more difficult, which is why it is important to keep your weapons and armor up to date. You should always make sure you are wearing the best and most powerful stuff, not to mention you should imbue your weapons with gems for stat boosts and weapon buffs. Sure, this can be a time consuming process since you do get a lot of loot, but it’s worth it in the end. Oh, one more thing, you’ll quickly start to get loot that you can’t equip until you meet the level requirements, which for some reason made me think of Diablo.

Going back to the skill tree, you can add your available skill points – that you earn from leveling up – into the hexagonal shaped skill tree. Depending on you playing style -and what you might need to overcome a particularly tricky area – you can allocate points weapons, health, karma, defense, and focus.

On top of that, you will also earn Karma skills. There are about 24 to unlock but you can only equip four at a time, so experiment as they unlock to see which ones work best for you in battles, so that when the time comes you select the highest damage dealing Karma skills and the ones that best complement your build.

Each of the four classes has two weapons a main weapon and a sub weapon, which you can improve by finding better weapons from hitting the boxes strewn around stages. Enemies also drop weapons, items, and money, so that comes in handy. Oh, and you should always be looking for treasure chests since they’ll hold some great loot for you. The best thing about loot is it is shared among all classes – again, something that reminded me of Diablo, specifically of Diablo III.

The loot is split into categories: Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. Epic and Legendary loot always have either extra abilities and buffs attached to them, and you definitely don’t want to sell those because you can upgrade these with gems to make them far more powerful… provided they have slots for the gems.

The bosses in Sadame are epic! They are big, mean and ugly, and while the first couple will be easy to defeat, the rest will require that you review their attack and movement pattern to maximize your attack potential and have a chance at vanquishing them. You will die a lot, but you’ll learn something new with every try, but it is worth it because the loot some of the bosses drop will make a huge difference.

Each map will offer different paths to take, so there is some replayability here – if you take care to remember each path you take during each stage. You may encounter different NPCs to talk to or a merchant, or even some treasure chests! But be careful, because the other path could also lead into an ambush full of deadly enemies out to get you!.

The best part of Sadame is the Assist mode. For this, you can invite players to assist you in battle via StreetPass if you have activated it. It is a pretty handy feature to have if you get stuck in a boss fight. Why not give it a try? .

Last but not least, Sadame has a wide variety of in-game achievement to unlock. Successfully completing achievements will earn you money to spend at the merchants so there is also a nice bonus for those of you who like to 100% a game. Once you complete the game you can unlock tougher difficulties for your subsequent runs, and considering you probably have a lot of loot to give to one of the other character classes at your disposal, you can definitely do it all over again at a higher difficulty rating.

Sadame is a fantastic and very enjoyable game. I definitely recommend picking this up because even if the campaign might feel a bit short for some of you, the several classes to master, the huge amount of weapons, items and armor to collect and the charming art style and music make this an excellent game you have to add to your 3DS collection!

Review

Pros

Cons

Very different character classes.
Extensive skill tree
Great replay value

No complaints!

Rating

92%

Disclaimer

This review is based on a European 3DS copy of Sadame provided by Rising Star Games

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